Ellis Marsalis Center For Music Opens in New Orleans Musicians’ Village In the Upper Ninth Ward

Today is the fifth anniversary of the fateful day when Hurricane Katrina disastrously made landfall in southeast Louisiana, settting in motion a chain of events still reverberating to this day. Do you really think we'd have seen the preventive measures taken just this weekend against Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene if Katrina hadn't precipitated the near destruction of New Orleans?

It is only fitting, therefore, that the end of last week saw Louisiana
Governor Bobby Jindal, New Orleans Mayor Mitchell Landrieu, and Harry
Connick, Jr., join pianist Ellis Marsalis and his musician sons
Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason—all NEA Jazz Masters—for the unveiling
ceremony of the Ellis Marsalis Center For Music.

Located
at 1901 Bartholomew Street in the Upper Ninth Ward, the Center will
serve as a state-of-the-art facility for the preservation and ongoing
development of New Orleans music and culture. Its neighbors will be a
cohort of displaced New Orleans musicians who reside in the 72
single-family homes and 10 elder-friendly units constructed several
years ago under the auspices of the New Orleans Area Habitat for
Humanity. Connick—whose father served many years as the District
Attorney of the Big Easy—and Branford Marsalis were the instigators.

“Jazz is a tremendous part of the city’s tradition,” Connick said,
“After the storm, we had to do more than just hope that the tradition
would continue.”

Funded primarily through private donations, the Center augments the
complex with a state of the art performance space and recording
facility, as well as computer facilities and classrooms where musical
instruction and cultural enrichment programs will be held.

“Other
people and organizations have created some wonderful programs,” Branford
Marsalis said, before noting that many are operating out of dilapidated
facilities, and often are unaffordable. “Our idea was to offer not just
music but computer literacy, Mardi Gras Indian culture, dance and all
kinds of things in one place.”

“We intend to be more than a music school and more than a
performance space,” Ellis Marsalis stated. “We intend to connect the art
forms—music and theater, music and dance, including hip hop, films and
the visual arts. We’re creating a new world, and only fragments of what
already exists will suffice.”

These activities are congruent with the Marsalis patriarch’s work in
New Orleans since 1964, when he began dual tracking as a
performer-educator. From 1974 to 1986 he taught and designed a
curriculum at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), a
multi-disciplinary arts magnet high school that students attended on
elective from their home school. Marsalis’ pupils included his four sons -- saxophonist Branford, trumpeter Wynton, trombonist Delfeayo, and
drummer Jason -- as well as Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Kent
Jordan, Reginald Veal and Connick.

In 1986 he left New Orleans to head
the jazz program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He returned in
1989 to create the jazz program at the University of New Orleans,
remaining there until his retirement.

The beginning of Marsalis’ teaching career coincided with the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, which abolished Jim Crow laws that had stood for
decades. Living under statutory segregation, he had accumulated and
processed the vocabulary of jazz "in a sort of shotgun approach - a
piece here, a little there," and could draw upon no codified pedagogy to
teach it.

“There was virtually no sound, formal training ground that
emanated from a specific black tradition where you could learn to play
jazz on the instrument,” Marsalis told me several years ago. “You
learned just about everything on the job, because there wasn't any place
else for you to get it. Jazz was always second-class."

“My dad forced all of us to think about what we were doing,”
Branford said. “Instead of rote learning, which encourages memorization
rather than understanding, he asked us to think about why we did
something. This forced me to approach music in a different way, one
that gave me a great advantage when I became a professional.”

"Ellis’s strengths are his greatness as a pianist coupled with his
ability to let you discover things on your own,” Connick said. “Instead
of insisting on teaching you his way, he watches and lets you discover.
He definitely taught me a lot about playing the piano, but his work
ethic and constant quest were even more important. That someone so
great never stops learning and practicing was his ultimate lesson.”